Shackled

In the April 2015 issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, the critic Alex Good says that Canadian literature is “shackled to a corpse dragging us down into the future”—a future that paradoxically, he says in the same paragraph, isn’t there. “The gerontocracy of the golden generation [of the sixties],” he writes, “has made a wasteland and called it a legacy,” resulting not in “the twilight of the book but its long dark night. There’s no future, no more belief in posterity.” This unhappy state of affairs was initiated, he claims, by Roland Barthes, who, in 1967 in “The Death of the Author,” argued that readers and critics do not require knowledge of an author in order to read or criticize a literary work. In Alex Good’s analysis, Barthes cleared the way for the Industrialization of Writing as controlled today by agents, publishers, critics, pundits, teachers and other non-writing hucksters: a difficult argument to follow over the course of some 12,000 words, and one that may or may not stand up to a reread.